And here are some very artistic renderings of actual Chinese characters (obviously very distorted, in order to become stylized pictures of the things they are meant to be representing - Chinese script became predominantly phonetic, albeit poorly, and cast off a lot of its "pictographicness" ages ago!):
http://www.chinasmack.com/2010/pictures/chinese-character-art.html

This (or at least something similar) is obviously possible in all written languages. Our minds seek what we expect to be there, and select the known item closest to what is actually on the page (not that listening is much different, mind). Exercises like this ought to be part of all linguistics degrees really, since this phenomenon has a lot of implications for language learning. For example, it shows that you don't learn much in a deep way without explicit attention, (i.e people don't "soak things up" all that well) and it shows that alphabet systems and character systems are more similar than people imagine.

I suppose you could say that it shows the opposite since you are learning fast and soaking up the way the numbers represent letters without really realizing how - but I think that is a different type of learning than learning the actual targets, and only short term.

Yes, I remember hearing that we seek patterns to satisfy some need in our brain. So that has implications for learning as well. And that we make connections with what we have already learned. Both are powerful tools to learn but also are the devil to erase if we connected the wrong things or learned a faulty pattern.

Yes, which rather implies that input should be pretty accurate, and that having lots and lots of free conversation in a class all of the same nationality has severe drawbacks.

It doesn't strike me that the code breaking exercise above is very suitable for language learners - after all it is only if you are supremely familiar with the targets that it is going to "work" and strike you as surprisingly easy to decode.